The video technology deployed in many consumer and professional devices relies upon one or more video processors to produce video signals for display. This is true for video game applications, as well as for applications that provide menus and/or other user interface elements having a three-dimensional, or “3D,” appearance.
One of the more popular features for incorporation into modern video processors is the implementation of powerful real-time video compression. In very general terms, video compression, or video encoding, compares one frame to the next and sends only the differences between frames. Such encoding works well if the video has small amounts of motion. A still frame of text, for example, can be repeated with very little transmitted data. However, if the video has with more motion, more pixels change from one frame to the next, and thus, the video compression scheme must send more data to keep up with the larger number of pixels that are changing.
Often, the most compelling video content may have extensive differences between frames (e.g., large amounts of motion, explosions, etc.). A very powerful video processing architecture is typically required to handle such intense video. Such video often has a great deal of high frequency detail and, in order to maintain frame rate, the video processor either decreases the quality of the video or increases the bit rate of the video to render this added information with the same level of detail as in previous frames.